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Mayor John Tory foolish to ignore Toronto’s leading lights on carding: James

The city's elites joined forced Wednesday to tell Tory that carding must end, but he shows no signs of heeding.

Former United Way president Gordon Cressy speaks in Toronto City Hall as he is backed by a group of prominent Torontonians opposing carding on June 1, 2015. (Cole Burston / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

After months of turning a deaf ear to the pleas of black citizens to reform the controversial and racist practice of carding, Mayor John Tory was bombarded Wednesday with similar cries from people he dared not ignore.

So he played dumb.

A who’s who of Toronto business, institution and political elite — including Tory’s political backers and election campaign co-chair — took the unprecedented step of holding a news conference at city hall to demand an end to routine police stops of citizens not involved in crime.

These community leaders — black, brown and white — said they were “offended by the notion,” “deeply distressed” and called on “all citizens of this city to step forward and make known their distaste of this fear-mongering practice.”

They were moved by analysis that shows black citizens — rich and poor, professionals and unemployed, uptown or downtown — are harassed by police while going about everyday activity.

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Gordon Cressy, a leader of the group Concerned Citizens to End Carding, said, “This is the moment when this city comes together and says, ‘Starting now, carding is stopped forever.’ ”

Tory quickly called his own news conference and pretended not to have known the depth of the opposition, until now.

Tory thanked the group for the message. Asked why, in April, he celebrated a decision that eviscerated a police board policy that would have tamed carding, Tory fudged, claiming that since then “I became aware that elements of the community are very dissatisfied with it.”

Not so, Mr. Mayor. You cannot claim you did not know. You knew, because so many people told you.

As soon as Tory became mayor last November, he reconfigured the Police Services Board, took a seat on the board, and proceeded to dismantle the rules governing carding that the previous board passed in April 2014. Then, Chief Bill Blair had balked at the rules.

At the key meeting, black community elders like Bev Salmon and Valarie Steele and Roy Williams pleaded for the board to keep the 2014 protocol. Tory listened to every word, seemingly detached.

Journalist Desmond Cole appeared as a deputant. He told Tory and the board he had resigned from his job reporting on the issue because he no longer wished to be impeded by so-called impartiality when carding was a matter of survival to so many of his peers.

Unmoved, Tory and the board majority dismantled the policy. The 2014 protocol required police to tell citizens that the carding engagement was voluntary. And to give them a receipt documenting the nature of the encounter. Tory smashed that.

Salmon, Williams and others left the April meeting insulted, demeaned, devastated, in tears.

Soon after, Cole’s first-person account of being stopped about 50 times by police, all in non-criminal investigations, hit the cover of Toronto Life. Cressy describes it as the “tipping point” that led to Wednesday’s news conference.

Tory could have admitted his mistake and added his name to the list of prominent Torontonians opposed to the practice. Instead he tried to baffle our brains with double-speak.

They want Tory, the police services board and new Chief Mark Saunders to end the practice immediately or risk damaging Toronto’s reputation and harming police-community relations.

When the former chief justice of Ontario and ex-attorney-general Roy McMurtry tells the world his mayor is abridging the charter rights of black citizens, ears finally open.

When three former mayors — David Crombie, John Sewell and Barbara Hall — sign on to a petition to “oppose carding vehemently,” you might want to take notice.

When university presidents (Sheldon Levy of Ryerson and U of T’s Meric Gertler) tell you keeping carding will “undermine everything we teach our children about Canada being a fair and equal society,” you might grow some concern.

When the former authors of reports on race relations — Walter Pitman, Alvin Curling, Lewis and McMurtry — say carding is dangerous to the city’s health and democracy, pay attention.

When the chorus of elders and upstanding citizens and business leaders and people who laid the foundation of our civil society say, loudly, “We cannot and will not accept this for any group or community in our city,” the jig is up.

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